1 Kings 5:9 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

Shall bring them. — The timber was to be carried down, or, perhaps, let down on slides along the face of the mountain towards the sea, and brought round by rafts to Joppa (2 Chronicles 2:16), to save the enormous cost and difficulty of land carriage. The grant of “food for his household” in return (instead of “hire”) brings out that which is recorded so many ages afterwards in Acts 12:20 — that the country of the Tyrians was “nourished” by Palestine. The commerce and wealth of the Tyrians collected a large population; the narrow slip of land along the coast, backed by Lebanon, must have been, in any case, insufficient to maintain them; and, moreover, all their energies were turned, not to agriculture, but to seamanship. In the grand description in Ezekiel 27 of the imports of Tyre from all parts of the world, Judah and Israel are named as supplying “wheat, and honey, and oil, and balm.”